Wagner James Au reports on virtual worlds & VR

Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Among the many advantages of being in a virtual world community with a truly international membership in every time zone is this: on New Year's Eve, no matter what RL time it is for you, people in-world are welcoming the next year already.

To vote on it, you need to go to the site, quickly create an account, and encourage your friends and colleagues to do so as well. I say "quickly", because apparently, the deadline for making the next round is Midnight tonight, and the proposal still needs several hundred votes.

The folks at NWN partner Koinup just passed along the final data for the year, tracking the number of times members of the virtual world social network clicked the teleport SLURLs of the Second Life sims listed in their directory. Here they are below, with more screenshots and SLURL at each link; try to visit them all before the year is out! (And congrats to the creators and owners of such artfully realized locations-- and all the Koinup members who paid tribute to them in the screenshots below.)

This is a look at Dark Isle, a new fantasy roleplaying sim created by Darby Dollinger and watcher Castaignede. Despite its painterly magnificence, Ms. Castaignede tells me,"The landscape shot of the sunset has very little Photoshop applied to it --
it was taken using WindLight settings and wide screen print screen
direct from my monitor." Billed as "Mythical Celtic Roleplaying", all of Dark Isle is striking, and a perfect theater for a new kind of group narrative. See more Dark Isle imagery on her Koinup profile.

"We love role play in Second Life," Watcher tells me. With Dark Isle, they're hoping for a movie-quality experience. ""[I]n SL we can
actually step into the movie, interact with its characters and
eventually influence plot and narrative." See for yourself: direct SLURL teleport to Dark Isle at this link.

Monday, December 29, 2008

The US government's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration created a Second Life presence back in 2006, but what have they been doing lately? Well, how about taking real time data from Google Earth via a customized importer, and layering that on top of a 90 meter scale model of the globe you can explore as an avatar in SL? In this demo video, NOAA-in-SL head Hackshaven Harford demos their Second Earth, which features the orbit of actual satellites circling the world.

This is a cool example of mixed reality and metaverse prototyping. The high quality card illustrations were derived from SL screenshots, an economical way of developing product art. And as you can guess from the photo at left, Combat Cards comfortably fits in the genre of Magic: The Gathering and other tabletop strategy card games. So it might actually be just as fun to play in the real world, as in SL. But starting the game's development in Second Life was probably an advantage for Mssrs. Boffin and Therian, since it gave them a low cost means of playtesting and fine-tuning it.

Friday, December 26, 2008

Next week, I'll aim to highlight the best posts throughout the big and diverse Second Life blogosphere throughout 2008. Which posts were your very favorite? Can be from any category, for any reason; that includes pod and vlogcasts. Please post in Comments, and of course, include the full URL.

Don't. There's a glut of stuff on the grid, so much stuff that it's
overwhelming, and if your stuffage isn't as good or better than the
stuff that's already out there you WILL get lost in the glut... Wait for the shakeout. I'd lay odds some of these new creators won't be able to keep going for too long.

In other words, if I read her right, the fashion industry is tapped out with content, we're in a deflationary period, and it's better to hang back awhile. I put it to other fashionistas: is this advice too downbeat, or on target?